the day it happened

It happened! After a lifetime (or so it seems) of working on the community center here in Chi Phat, it was finally reopened with a new and improved service for the community!

You see, all our past delegations worked on the establishment of the community center as a center for our activity in the village, but the completion of its building was a sort of an endless story, that we, the third delegation ourselves, have had to deal with, and in fact still do, since we still have things to do.

When we came here, we set ourselves the goal of providing the community with a rainy season activity, to replace the school that goes on a 2 months vacation. We consider this to be an opportunity for us to set the center as a major place in the life of the community, and therefore tried to build a schedule that will be as appealing as possible and as wide ranging as possible, offering such classes as English and computers for children, youth and adults, and also art classes, dancing, singing and movie making, along with our long running library, and a newly opened play room.



Much preparation was going on, with our volunteers working literally form sunrise to way past sunset to get things done. We set yesterday, the 27th of July as the celebration day, and even organized with the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok to bring a very talented musician, Tal Kravitz, to put on a show. With the help of our friends from Wildlife Alliance, the construction was done a day before, to everyone’s relief.

On the day of the ceremony we gathered our Excellence Team, gave them red ribbons to wear with their name tags, so that they will stand out and people will know them, and soon it was time for the speeches. I tried my best to make it a short one, but failed, like always, and then it was turn for the deputy district governor, who said everything we wanted to hear – how much the community supports our work, and encouraged people to take part in it.

Even more important were the next two speeches: the one of the newly appointed local manager of the community center, Mr. Sen, and the one of our excellence team. These two together will make up the group that makes sure our works stays after we are gone, so it was very important for us to present them to the community in a very dignified way.

Next it was time for the show. And what a show it was. Hundreds of people gathered, some of which we have never seen before, to watch the music magician. Tal plays instruments he gathered from all over the world, and is able to excite just about any crowd. When he started playing a wood saw, people were speechless. When he sang they sang with him. The audience was so captivated that we considered it a perfect opportunity to get to these people who we have not seen before, and hand out information about our activities.

The day after was the day we were picking the fruits of our hard work. We announced this to be an open registration day, thinking it will be a good opportunity for us to get some order into things, buy even we didn’t expect things to go so well. As soon as we opened the doors, literally hundreds of people came in, all saying what courses they want to take. We stood there, tears in our eyes, not able to believe how things have changed in our village.